Living with your car: Safety, cost and care;

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By KEN W. PURDY
In the eighty-five years the automobile has been with us, about 4,100 makes have been offered for sale, They have ranged from the Abadal, made in Bar-celona in 1913, to the Zwickau, which had a run of three years in Germany beginning in 1956. There have been cars powered by compressed air, kerosene, steam, electricity and clock-work springs. They have run on two wheels, three, four, six and eight, and they have carried bodies ranging from a platform of hickory slats to hand-formed aluminum dotted with 18-karat gold stars on the outside, raw silk and ebony within.
As recently as the 1930s the choice of a new car was complicated by the number of makes available, many of them unique, quite distinct from all others. It's easier today, when we find four major manufacturers in the United States and only six in Germany, where the automobile was invented. Never-theless, the number of models avail-able in domestic and imported cars, and the tremendous range of optional equipment, can sometimes make it seem as if there were still 4,100 to choose from.
Too often today's buyer has a ten-dency to select a car on little more than whim. He buys a Stugmobile station wagon because the man next door claims to have run one for three years with almost no maintenance ex-pense. Or he gets a Frattistat hardtop because his wife is mad about it for unexplained reasons, and besides she reminds him that last time he promised that she could choose their next car.
The only logical way to buy a car is in consideration of the specialized use to which it will be put. The man who's going to tour Europe, no ex-pense barred, and wants to take full advantage of the limit-free autobahnen and autostrada is in the market for one of the great 150 mph gran turismo cars; Ferrari, Corvette, Maserati, Lam-borghini, Aston-Martin. Jensen. At the other end of the stick, the oil com-pany engineer who's just been trans-ferred to Alaska may need a Jeep or
living with
a Land Rover, complete with a winch with which he can haul it out of any-thing it gets stuck in. The chairman of the board of a corporation who con-stantly entertains VIPs may specify a Cadillac Fleetwood or a Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman and at the same time order a stripped small car for his son's senior year at college.
Most of us fall into the middle of the spectrum: we don't need an 518,500 Ferrari or a four-wheel-drive Jeep. The common situation is prob-ably that of the professional man in the early stage of his career who needs a good car for his wife, one in which she can reliably chauffeur the children around, run the household errands and take an occasional 100-mile trip, and, for himself, something a little less utilitarian, something with more style, but still reliable and eco-nomical.
The automobile industry is in a tre-mendous state of flux today because of the intrusion, the violent intrusion one might almost say, of three factors that simply did not exist in public consciousness before World War II: safety, size and pollution.
Pollution is in the hands of the fed-eral government and the manufactur-ers. We know that if the internal com-bustion engine isn't largely pollutant free within the next decade, it will be replaced by another form of prime mover, but at the moment the i.e. en-gine is all we have. (However, ! sus-pect that the Lear steam turbine is going to be significant.)
As for size, that's a matter of eco-nomics. The big car has a higher initial cost than a small car, a higher maintenance cost, burns premium gasoline and more of it. it offers more protection to occupants in a crash-provided their seat belts are fastened, of course—but a small car. well driven,
is better able to avoid certain types of accidents through sheer performance.
Federal safety standards are gradu-ally relieving the consumer of the ne-cessity of assaying every car sepa-rately. Major safety design features-collapsible steering posts, burst proof door latches, head rests and so on— are standard now, but there are still areas that repay individual attention, All rear-engine automobiles, for ex-ample, have a tendency to instability in crosswinds and to oversteer, or rear-end skid, in hard corners. (On European highways the warning sign Sidewinds! is common,) I usually recommend against rear-engine cars for women drivers for this reason.
Placement of controls is important. One U.S. luxury car has a windshield-wiper switch so small, and so awk-wardly placed, that most owners take their eyes off the road to use it. It seems a small matter until you realize